by Chris Copyright November 2010Re: Photo:Ancient Pacific Northcoast First Nations Artists came down firmly on the side of giant pterosaur flight? “Haida Raven Rattle” shows man on the back of large flying creature. A dragon at the rear has tongue connected to rider which was a common feature of these pieces. Comparison with Quetalcoatlus, a giant pterosaur.

There are a lot of â€śdisciplinesâ€ť out there that call themselves â€śscienceâ€ť or scientific which in fact are neither. Paleontology is one of those disciplines.

Wikipedia tells us that; â€śscience is an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the natural worldâ€ť. An older definition of science would call it a body of knowledge that could be logically and/or convincingly explained.

Quite a bit of what passes for science these days would not fit either of those â€śclassicalâ€ť definitions of science; and this specifically includes paleontology. Early God believing practitioners of the Aristotelian method used its logic and its deductive and inductive reasoning to study and make observations about Godâ€™s creation. Modern scientific disciplines have become unscientific because its materialistic practitioners create mythologies and just so stories in order to seek to separate God from His creation.

Modern science has become religion. Modern science is about consensus. Modern science is about materialistic explanations only. Modern science is concerned with politics and right thinking. Modern science goes after non-conformists every bit as much as the Catholic Church went after Galileo.

Michael Crichton, an evolutionist, sadly now passed on once wrote:

â€śIn recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct.â€ť…Aliens Cause Global Warming

Crichtonâ€™s specific concern was the kind of â€śconsensus scienceâ€ť that surrounded disciplines like climatology and SETI. Science was now in the business of creating a consensus instead of building and organizing facts around testable hypotheses. Not only that science is now in the business of attacking the credibility and motivations of even their brother scientists whenever they failed to bow down to the paradigm, he believed.

As a current example, science has taken to identifying climate warming non adopters by the pejorative term â€śclimate change deniersâ€ť in an attempt to cast people who have doubts about the global warming consensus in the same light as those who deny the Holocaust.

Climatology is not science. This supposed scientific discipline studies supposedly studies the history of our planet covering they believe over 4 billion years. In the past 30 years or so they have been building a consensus built upon carefully selected data for â€śglobal warmingâ€ť. In the process, they attack and silence non-believers.

If this really was a science that built and organized testable explanations or that created a body of knowledge that could be logically or convincingly explained, why was the principal fear of that science as late as 1975; worldwide, global cooling?

Here is a headline from the New York Times, 1975: â€śScientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead; Scientists Ponder Why Worldâ€™s Climate Is Changing; a Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitableâ€¦by WALTER SULLIVAN, The New York Times
May 21, 1975â€ť.

A discipline that comes to diametrically opposing conclusions within the span of 35 or 40 years about the weather of a planet supposedly 4.5 billion years old has no predictive or scientific value whatsoever. Thatâ€™s why climatology is not a science. (see All The Really Smart People Believe in Man-Made Global Warming)

He said that because design and intelligence are now obvious and inherent characteristics of the DNA/RNA system. DNA is a language that contains an unimaginable amount of data that is stored in the cells of everything living. DNA is not only a language like English or Russian, it conveys a Message to every living cell that components of the cell understand and execute. Life could not exist without the DNA/RNA system because the instructions for life are conveyed by the system.

Any science that ignores this obvious truth and instead mythologizes a materialistic â€śexplanationâ€ť for DNA’s creation and existence cannot be called a science. After all, it is ill-logical and thus anti-scientific to find a message in literally every living cell and not to understand that someone or something intelligent sent that message. The contents of the message conveyed by this langauge in the smallest single bacterium cell is beyond the technology of man.

As an additional blemish on their scientific credentials; â€śscientistsâ€ť named a portion of DNA that they did not have the capacity to understand â€śjunk DNAâ€ť believing at the time it had no function. As time has passed and itâ€™s become clear that those sections of DNA in fact have very important functions, the term junk science would seem to have been more appropriate.

Cosmology is not a science. The big bang is not a theory; (a hypotheses backed by testing data) it is a materialistic philosophical mythology. How can a scientific explanation fail to explain upwards of 97% of observation? This is in fact the exact opposite of the classical definitions of science. Dark matter and dark energy are two place fillers invented out of darkened imaginations to account for observations in the real world that the theory doesnâ€™t contemplate and can’t explain.

Neither dark matter nor dark energy can be seen or detected. They are invisible, undetectable and mythological in exactly the same way fairies are. This is why cosmology is not science.

Sometimes even â€śhard scienceâ€ť like physics isnâ€™t science. Not when it has to do the bidding of materialists. In the last several decades itâ€™s become abundantly clear that we live in an anthropic universe. That is, itâ€™s become clear that the universe was created to cradle life and even more disturbing for some; that this planet and solar system have many characteristics seemingly tailored for life.

In desperation, superstring theory; a mythology that there exist an infinite number of universes inhabiting the same space and that we just happen to be one among those infinite universes that supports life has been created out of vivid imagination, materialistic philosophy and chewing gum? Of course, the multi-verses of superstring theory can not be seen, detected. The theory is untestable. This lack of â€śtestabilityâ€ť is precisely why materialists claim that â€śspecial creationâ€ť is not scientific.

A paleontologist is a â€śscientistâ€ť who studies the history of life on earth, focusing on organisms that lived in the distant past. Paleontologists can wax for hours about the â€śCambrian Explosionâ€ť and the â€śGreat Dyingâ€ť mostly without even realizing that they are describing creation and the fall from Genesis.

Paleontology is the kind of science where someone with a PhD can publish an article in a scientific journal suggesting that â€śmaybeâ€ť a mutation in a single protein-led to smaller jaw muscles in an apeâ€”which then gave them more room in their skulls to develop a larger “human” brain. This scientific mythology was reported worldwide. One can only surmise that the authors of this â€śscientific articleâ€ť and those who accepted it must have had disturbingly large jaw muscles?

Paleontological scientific findings are slavishly reported by the news media and fawned over by materialists because it is the scientific discipline that most directly seeks to support Darwinism and materialism. Evolutionary theory is most often seen through the lenses of this â€śscienceâ€ť. One with an open mind would be hard pressed to discover one thing that paleontologists are correct about. On the other hand, no one speaks with more apparent authority than the paleontologists. Every body that they study is already dead after all; whose going to contradict?

Remember Ida, the fossil that was supposed to be an early human ancestor that was going to change everything? The subject of the simultaneous release of a book and a documentary and much slavish media reporting in April 2009 did not in the end make most if any of the most prominent Top 10 Scientific Stories of the year lists. How is this possible for a science? (see Fossil Ida; Evolutionists Now Dare Not Speak Its Name)

Apologists for non-science science often snootily declare that this is what is great about science; its always willing to admit its mistakes and then to move forward. This is what is admirable about science they say.

Perhaps this is true, but meanwhile; the patient is dead.

In April 2009, a study was published and then breathlessly reported worldwide to the effect that Giant Pterosaurs, a creature supposedly extinct for more that 65 million years, could not fly. â€śGiant Pterosaurs Couldn’t Fly, Study Suggestsâ€ť

Itâ€™s a mystery how natural selection working through beneficial mutations could confer evolutionary advantage to a creature with giant, useless wings but that is paleontology for you; its not rocket scienceâ€”its not even science. Shut up and believe.

The study was published by study leader Katsufumi Sato, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute.

â€śBased on the weights and body sizes of modern birds, a new study finds that animals heavier than 90 pounds (41 kilograms) with wingspans greater than 16.7 feet (5.1 meters) wouldn’t be able to flap fast enough to stay aloft.â€ť, the study concluded.

The conclusion casts serious doubt on the flying ability of large pterosaurs such as Quetzalcoatlus, thought to be one of the largest airborne animals of all time.

Dutifully, other scientists began surmising that these giant pterosaurs were swimmers instead. Materialistic science teachers passed this new information on to their students. Young evolution influenced kids began drawing versions of wingless pterosaurs and posting them on evolution websites looking for approval.

Posters on sites like Talk Origins went on and used this new â€śscientific informationâ€ť to berate believers. â€śWhy would God create a giant pterosaur that couldnâ€™t flyâ€ť? Why would evolution do that they forgot to ask themselvesâ€¦.what would be the evolutionary advantage?

Anyway, another scientist in the paleontological world was working on his own study regarding pterosaur flight. Now, if both of these studies were scientific, and relied on building testable hypotheses or built knowledge bases etcâ€¦.. One might say, how could they do that? The creatures they study or just bits and pieces of fossilized bones, I would say; â€śexactly correctâ€ť and that again is why paleontology is not science.

Paleontologist Michael Habib offered new findings about giant pterosaurs based on â€śnew models of their wingspans, shape and body massâ€ť. His study was reported on October 18, 2010 in National Geographic News approximately 18 months after the prior study had been reported on, also in National Geographic News.

Now would Habibâ€™s study support Satoâ€™s no fly theory? Would it perhaps suggest that wellâ€¦..maybe they could fly a little bit given a strong wind, a one thousand foot cliff and Air Jordans?

The title of the new study or at least of the News articles tell the story: â€śPrehistoric Reptile Could Fly 10,000 Milesâ€ť.

â€śIt’s now believed that some of the larger pterosaurs, such as this Tropeognathus mesembrinus, could fly as far as 10,000 miles at a time.

Whether you learned in school to call them pterodactyls or pteranodons, pterosaur fossils have been found all around the world and lived from 65 million to 200 million years ago.

They ranged in size from some with an average wingspan of 6 feet to the giant giraffe-sized Quetzalcoatlus of Texas that could reach up to a 30-foot wingspan.â€ť

Quetzalcoatlus was one of the giant pterosaurs specifically mentioned in the prior article as not being able to get itself off the ground.

Evolution is incredibly flexible and malleable and so are its believers. You see how the article explains that they now believe something diametrically opposed to what they firmly believed only 18 months ago?

Remarkable. Thatâ€™s why paleontology is more religion; faith and belief than it is science.

Paleontologists have certainly covered the bases here when it comes to giant pterosaur flight. There is one thing that we now know with â€śscientific certaintyâ€ť; giant pterosaurs either could not get off the ground and couldnâ€™t so much as even flap their wingsâ€”or they were the greatest terrestrial flyers of all time! One scientist claims that his study shows that giant pterosaurs could not get off the ground. The second study indicates that they were the greatest fliers of all time.

Meanwhile, the news media slavishly reports the new information without reference to the old information and certianly without criticism or their own analysis. Materialistic science teachers passed this new information on to their students. Young evolution influenced kids began drawing versions of space-going pterosaurs and posting them on evolution websites looking for approval.

Posters on sites like Talk Origins will now go on and try to use this new â€śscientific informationâ€ť to berate believers.